Abstract With the rapid growth of the passenger population as well as the complex situation caused by the past pandemic, airlines need to recruit flight attendants with strong medical emergency response capabilities. In China, the cultivation of flight attendant students is mainly done by vocational colleges or universities. Aero-medical aspects and first aid (AMAFA) course is considered crucial and mandatory for preparing qualified flight attendants. This calls for the development of a sound curriculum that focuses explicitly on educational objectives, materials, instructional approaches, and processes that must be planned, implemented, and adjusted on time. However, present AMAFA education have not kept pace with changing circumstances and meet aviation industrial demands, notably in the aftermath of the pandemic. Guided by competency-based education (CBE) and Taba’s model of curriculum development, this study aims to explore the perceptions of educators and airline professionals as well as the perceived needs of flight attendant students to enhance the content, pedagogical approaches, and course delivery of AMAFA and further optimize the AMAFA curriculum design. Thirty flight attendant students from two colleges were recruited for focus group discussions to clarify students’ needs toward AMAFA learning. Meanwhile, a total of 18 professionals with aviation backgrounds were invited for semi-structured interviews (11 flight attendants from 9 airlines, 3 airline instructors, and 4 teachers in colleges teaching the AMAFA course) to identify the aviation industry’s requirements and teachers’ perspectives. Core competencies required by the aviation industry, preferences and aspirations of flight attendant students, competency gaps, possible resources, suitable instructional strategies, and barriers to learning were identified by conducting a comprehensive needs analysis (NA). A new curriculum framework of the AMAFA was proposed, which is fundamental and can inform the development of effective and favorable educational interventions for AMAFA education.
Xu et al. (Thu,) studied this question.